Psychedelic Drugs in the Twentieth Century

Lester Grinspoon & James B. Bakalar

Hence, in intent, mystical salvation definitely means aristocracy;
it is an aristocratic religiosity of redemption And, in the midst
of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday
life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic
brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree.

Max Weber

But once kabbalism came to perform a social function, it did so by
providing an ideology for popular religion. It was able to perform
this function in spite of its fundamentally aristocratic character,
because its symbols, reflecting as they did the historical experienc
of the group, provided the faith of the masses with a theoretical justification.

Gershom Scholem

Reality is a crutch

Graffito of the Sixties

The reception of psychedelic drugs in modern industrial society
is a complicated topic for the future cultural historian. Their
influence has been broad and occasionally deep, varied but often
hard to define. By now millions of people in the United States
and Europe at all levels of society have used them; they have
served as a day's vacation from the self and ordinary waking consciousness,
as psychotherapy, professional or self-prescribed, and as the
inspiration for works of art, especially for rock songs, the folk
music of the electronic age; they have also provided a basis for
metaphysical and magical systems, an initiatory ritual and a fountain
of cultural symbolism for dissident groups; their use has been
condemned and advocated as a political act or a heretical religious
rite. Since the early 1960s, the cultural history of psychedelic
drugs has been inseparable from the episode that has become known
as the hippie movement. When the hippies were at the center of
the public stage, so were psychedelic drugs; as the hippie movement
became assimilated, losing its distinctiveness but leaving many
residues in our culture, psychedelic drugs moved to the periphery
of public consciousness, but they continue to exert a similar
subtle influence.
It is impossible to write an adequate history of such an amorphous
phenomenon without discussing the whole cultural rebellion of
the 1960s; and it is impossible to do that adequately with the
sources now available, which are very numerous (millions of words
were spilled on the subject) but scattered, low in quality, and
often inaccessible. The underground magazines, newspapers, and
broadsides must be searched for serious themes underlying the
extravagant claims, pseudorevolutionary wrath, drugged platitudes,
and gleeful or savage mockery of elders and betters. The Iyrics,
music, and public performances and poses of rock groups in the
late 1960s must also be reinterpreted without wartime partisanship
as the expression of a moment in culture. Biographies, memoirs,
and recorded oral reminiscences will eventually give some sense
of the texture of the time in the words of people who no longer
feel obliged to attack or defend ideological phantoms. The cultural
history of psychedelic drugs, like the cultural history of alcohol,
cuts across too many social categories to be easily formulated
as a single story. It will ultimately emerge only from the accumulation
of separate stories about the people who have used the drugs;
only a beginning has been made, and the knowledge we have is atypical,
either because it concerns spectacular and unusual events like
the Manson cult's killings or the great rock festivals, or because
the rare highly articulate commentator, like Timothy Leary or
Tom Wolfe, is deliberately taking a participant's point of view
and a polemical stance. The immediacy of such journalism and memoirs
cannot be reproduced here, and yet any narrative must be partial
and ill-proportioned, since the immortalizing light of publicity
has touched only parts of the scene. The most important questions
the story raises are: What cultural changes have the drugs effected?
Which of their cultural functions have been exhausted and which
are still operating? What unexplored or incompletely explored
possibilities remain? The answers will demand a detailed examination
of the drugs' properties and uses as well as the social history
that follows.
The starting point of this history is as indeterminate as the
definition of a psychedelic drug. We might begin with the discovery
of distilled liquor, the elixir of life, in the thirteenth century,
or the introduction of coffee and tobacco in the seventeenth century,
or the stimulus provided by the artificial paradises of opium
and hashish to the imaginations of such men as Coleridge, De Quincey,
and Baudelaire in the nineteenth century. But for our purposes
we can say that the first "new" psychedelic substance
to make a social impact in Europe and the United States was nitrous
oxide. Its introduction is associated with some famous scientific
names. Joseph Priestley discovered it in 1772, and its effects
were fully explored for the first time by Humphry Davy, Faraday's
teacher, in 1798. Davy tested it extensively on himself and his
artist and scientist friends and published a 600-page volume entitled
Researches Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous
Oxide and Its Respiration, in which he enthusiastically described
the philosophical euphoria it produced. Further testimonials came
from poets like Coleridge and Robert Southey: Coleridge, an opium
addict, called nitrous oxide "the most unmingled pleasure"
he had ever experienced; Southey wrote, "The atmosphere of
the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas."
Others who inhaled it were Josiah Wedgwood and Roget of Roget's
Thesauris. Nitrous oxide was nothing more than an esoteric
entertainment for gentlemen of the cultural elite until the 1840s,
when Horace Wells and William Morton introduced it into dentistry
as an anesthetic; dentists and surgeons still use it for that
purpose.
Attempts to derive a philosophy or guide for life arise from each
succeeding new form of intoxication or altered consciousness,
and nitrous oxide was no exception. In 1874 the American Benjamin
Paul Blood wrote a pamphlet called "The Anesthetic Revelation
and the Gist of Philosophy"; William James read it and was
prompted to experience the metaphysical illumination himself;
the passages he wrote on drug-induced mysticism and its relation
to philosophical questions remain among the most eloquent and
intellectually acute comments on a subject that has otherwise
produced much foggy writing. But neither the psychedelic effects
of nitrous oxide nor the sometimes similar effects of ether and
chloroform, also used in the nineteenth century medicinally and
for pleasure, ever became a matter of great public interest. A
few eccentrics like Blood tried to derive a metaphysics from them,
but no nitrous oxide cults were formed. The revelations experienced
on operating tables and in dentists' chairs remained as private
as most spontaneous mystical experience. This can be partly explained
by the brevity of the effect and the fact that its meaning tended
to fade from memory, as well as the difficulties in handling and
transporting a gas. Even more important, no social precedent for
public recognition existed until the drug revolution of the 1960s
intensified the search for mind-altering chemicals and provided
drug users with ideologies and models for organization. Today
nitrous oxide is publicized in the drug culture's communications
media, and there are formal groups advocating its use for pleasure
and transcendence (see Shedlin and Wallechinsky 1973).
The rapid development of experimental physiology and pharmacology
in the late nineteenth century generated an extensive search through
folk pharmacopoeias for new drugs and efforts to extract the active
principles of familiar ones. Among the many drugs discovered or
synthesized (including cocaine and aspirin) was mescaline, the
latest successor to opium, cannabis, and anesthetics as a creator
of artificial paradises. The peyote cactus had been vaguely known
from the descriptions of early Spanish chroniclers and later anthropologists
and travelers, but its presence was not felt in industrial society
until the Plains Indian peyote religion made it familiar on the
southwestern frontier of the United States after the Civil War.
Scientific study of mescaline began in 1880, when a woman in Laredo,
Texas, sent samples of peyote to several medical researchers and
to the drug house Parke-Davis. Ludwig Lewin tested peyote extract
on animals and in 1888 published the first scientific report on
the new drug (Lewin 1888). From then on interest grew slowly but
persistently, paralleled and reinforced by the rise of the peyote
religion. Mescaline was isolated in 1895 and synthesized in 1919.
Parke-Davis and European drug houses marketed peyote for a while
as a respiratory and heart stimulant, but it did not become an
important therapeutic agent like opium, cannabis, and nitrous
oxide. Instead it was used experimentally to study the nature
of the mind and mental disturbances, and also taken independently
by scholars, intellectuals, and artists to explore unfamiliar
regions of consciousness. In the 1890s Weir Mitchell and Havelock
Ellis gave the earliest personal accounts of peyote intoxication
in medical journals; they emphasized the esthetic aspect of the
experience and pointed out that the intellect was relatively unimpaired
(Mitchell 1896; Ellis 1897). Galton and Charcot also studied mescaline;
William James tried peyote, but the only effect was stomach cramps
and vomiting. In the tradition represented by J.-J. Moreau de
Tours' Hashish and Mental Illness of 1845, mescaline intoxication
was regarded as a potential chemical model for psychosis; the
idea was introduced in the 1890s, at about the same time that
the concept of schizophrenia itself was crystallizing. This use
of mescaline was periodically revived and not entirely abandoned
until seventy years later (see, for example, Knauer and Maloney
l91S; Stockings 1940). As early as the 1920s enough knowledge
had been accumulated for several substantial books: Alexandre
Rouhier's Peyotl: La plante qui fait les yeux emerveilles (1927);
Karl Beringer's Der Mescalinrausch (1927); and the first
work attempting a formal classification and analysis of mescaline
visions, Heinrich Kluver's Mescal: The Divine Plant and Its
Psychological Effects (1928).
Several other mind-altering drugs were discovered or developed
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Europeans
discovered the iboga root in the 1860s, and ibogaine was extracted
in 1901. Ayahuasca was described by travelers in the 1850s;
harmine and harmaline were first synthesized in 1927, and in 1928
Lewin conducted the first experiment with harmine in human subjects
(Lewin 1929). By 1941 Schultes and others had rediscovered the
sacred mushrooms and morning glories of Mexico, although their
chemical constituents were still unknown. MDA had been synthesized
as early as 1910, and in 1932 Gordon Alles (the discoverer of
amphetamine) tested it on himself and described the effects. So
at the time of the discovery of LSD there was already an established
tradition of literary and medical research into the properties
of drugs that would later be called psychedelic or hallucinogenic.
As the first synthetic substance to exhibit mescaline-like properties
and the most powerful psychoactive drug ever discovered, LSD gave
a strong impetus to this research. Albert Hofmann developed the
new drug in 1938 at the laboratories of the Sandoz drug company
in Basel, Switzerland. It was one of a series of synthetic derivatives
of ergot alkaloids produced in a search for new medicines; Hofmann
knew nothing of mescaline and was not looking for psychoactive
properties. He had already synthesized the uterine contractant
ergonovine in 1936, and the chemical structure of the new compound
suggested a potential respiratory and circulatory stimulant. He
designated if LSD-25, because it was the twenty-fifth compound
of the lysergic acid amide series. It was tested on animals, but
Sandoz pharmacologists did not find the results interesting enough
to pursue. Hofmann did not lose interest, however, and on April
16, 1943, he prepared a fresh batch. As it crystallized, a trace
was absorbed through the skin of his fingers, and he had a mild
psychedelic experience. Three days later, on April 19, he swallowed
250 micrograms, planning to raise the dose gradually, since no
substance known at the time was active in such small quantities.
As we know now, 250 micrograms was more than enough for a very
powerful effect. This first inadvertent high-dose LSD trip was
understandably terrifying; at times Hofmann feared that he would
lose his mind or die. The powers of LSD were confirmed by other
Sandoz employees, and in 1947, after a delay because of the war,
Werner A. Stoll at the University of Zurich published the results
of an experiment with psychiatric patients and normal volunteers
as subjects (Stoll 1947); he used Lewin-s term "Phantasticum"
(plural "Phantastica") to describe the drug. Sandoz
sent samples to several research institutions in Europe and the
United States, and other reports began to appear in 1949.
So began the first phase of LSD's history, which lasted until
the early 1960s. During this period Sandoz supplied it to medical
researchers in Europe and America as an investigatory drug; scholarly
papers described its effects on various human functions at various
doses, compared it to other drugs, and examined its therapeutic
uses and the relation of its action to schizophrenia. Stoll had
already noted the resemblance between LSD and mescaline; soon
it seemed advisable to speak of a class of drugs variously named
psychotomimetic, hallucinogenic, psycholytic, psychodysleptic,
or psychedelic; the rather appropriate "phantastica"
(or "phantasticant") was unfortunately abandoned. Dimethyltryptamine,
ibogaine, harmaline and many synthetic drugs of indole and methoxylated
amphetamine structure were soon placed in this class, and so were
psilocin and psilocybin after their discovery in the late 1950s.
The number of scientific reports on LSD alone rose from six in
1950 to 118 in 1956; thereafter it remained at about one hundred
a year until research with human subjects was cut off almost completely
in the mid-1960s (Hoffer and Osmond 1967, p. 83). Throughout the
fifties psychedelic drugs, mainly LSD and mescaline, were rather
freely available to physicians and psychiatrists in Europe and
the United States. They were regarded as promising therapeutic
agents or as interesting new tools for exploring the mind; the
United States Army and the CIA also investigated them in ethically
dubious and sometimes outrageous experiments as incapacitating
agents for chemical warfare (see Asher 1975; Taylor and Johnson
1976);[1]but the evidence
from many thousands of trials seemed to show that they were not
particularly damaging to the mind or bodynor even attractive
enough to become a drug abuse problem, since their effects seemed
variable and as often terrifying or emotionally exhausting as
pleasant. Havelock Ellis had remarked at the turn of the century
that mescaline might succeed opium and hashish as a euphoriant,
and others since had testified to the occasional beauty and wonder
of the psychedelic experience; but only a few men like Aldous
Huxley were prescient enough to imagine before 1960 that LSD and
mescaline would rise to higher social visibility or become a larger
cultural phenomenon than nitrous oxide or cannabis had been in
the nineteenth century.
Even in the 1950s interest had not been confined to laboratories
and hospital research wards. LSD, several thousand times as powerful
as mescaline, was easier to produce and distribute in the quantities
necessary to gain a wide reputation. And the nature and intensity
of the psychedelic experience were such that those who did not
retreat in horror often became proselytes. The new interest in
psychedelic drugs had the same kinds of sources as earlier drug
vogues: medical researchers and psychiatrists who were trying
LSD themselves and giving it to their friends and private patients;
botanists, anthropologists, and amateur scholars who were continuing
the search for psychedelic plants in the tradition of Lewin and
Schultes; and literary people of the kind who have always taken
inspiration from new forms of drug-induced changes in consciousness.
This time the synthetic chemists were also at work ingeniously
manipulating molecular structures to create new compounds either
derived from the natural psychedelics or suggested by them. A
chronology might include the following:

1949: LSD is introduced for the first time in the United States
at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital (now the Massachusetts Mental
Health Center), and research on its psychotomimetic properties
begins.

1950: Busch and Johnson publish first recommendation of LSD as
an adjunct to psychotherapy.

1951: Humphry Osmond begins work with mescaline and LSD at a Saskatchewan
hospital.

1953: First clinic using LSD in psycholytic ("mind loosening'')
therapy established at Powick Hospital in England by Sandison.

1953: Aldous Huxley writes to Humphry Osmond about one of his
papers on mescaline; a correspondence follows, and Osmond administers
mescaline to Huxley.

1953: William Burroughs in the Amazon taking yage; Wasson in Mexico
in search of psychedelic mushrooms.

1954: Huxley publishes The Doors of Perception describing
the mescaline effect and reflecting philosophically on it.

1954: Virola tree identified as source of Amazonian snuffs.

1955: Wasson takes teonanacatl in Oaxaca.

1955: Atlantic City meeting of the American Psychiatric Association
includes symposium on psychedelic drugs addressed by Huxley; the
book LSD and Mescaline in Experimental Psychiatry, edited
by Louis O. Cholden, comes out of the conference.

1955: Peretz and others present first clinical report on TMA.

1956: Stanislav Grof begins his career of LSD research in Prague.

1956: Expedition to Oaxaca by Wasson and Heim; Psilocybe mexicana
identified and the mushrooms sent to Hofmann.

1956: Stephen Szara presents first clinical report on DMT and
DET.

1957: Article on magic mushrooms by the Wassons appears in Life.
1957: The drug house Smith, Kline & French issues report
on clinical trials of MDA since 1949.

1958: The theologian Alan Watts takes LSD for the first time.

1958: Hofmann reports isolation and synthesis of psilocin and
psilocybin.

1959: Hofmann isolates Iysergic acid amides from ololiuqui
seeds.

1959: First international conference devoted to LSD; from it comes
the book, The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy, edited by Harold
Abramson.

1959: Phencyclidine introduced.

1959: The novelist Ken Kesey takes LSD, peyote, phencyclidine,
and other drugs as an experimental volunteer at Menlo Park Veteran's
Hospital in California.

1960: Over 500 papers on LSD in print.

In 1955, Huxley spoke of "a nation's well-fed and metaphysically
starving youth reaching out for beatific visions in the only way
they know"through drugs (Young and Hixson 1966, p. 48).
In an article on mescaline in the Saturday Evening Post in
1958, he suggested that it might produce a revival of religion
(Huxley 1977, pp. 146-156). The fulfillment of his prophecies
began when college students yearning to free themselves from the
stuffy complacency of the 1950s fell under the influence of academic
and literary figures promoting psychedelic drugs as a means for
the permanent transformation of consciousness. The fact that psychedelic
visions could be hellish as well as beatific was another fascinating
challenge to the user rather than an objection to this astounding
new way of feeding metaphysical appetites. The psychedelic movement
was a kind of crisis cult within Western industrial society, formed
by children of affluence and leisure who were inadequately assimilated
culturally and homeless psychologically. Their malaise was best
described in Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960). What
had turned the Plains Indians to peyote in the 1870s turned some
college-educated whites to LSD in the 1960s; their old cultural
forms seemed meaningless, and they needed new symbols and rituals
to shape beliefs and guide action. The hippies who fancied themselves
as white Indians, successors to the hipsters described by Norman
Mailer as white Negroes, may not have been so wrong; but they,
resembled traditional Indians less than those other modern men,
the adherents of the peyote religion (see Spindler 1952).
Like the peyote religion, the psychedelic movement represented
a confluence of several cultural streams and had many independent
founders. Professionals and intellectuals with metaphysical and
religious interests were important as guides, psychopomps, or
road men; artists, including novelists and poets like Ken Kesey
and Allen Ginsberg as well as rock musicians and the creators
of psychedelic posters, light shows, and underground comics, also
provided inspiration; other leaders came forth from among pop-culture
hedonists or radical dropouts. Organized medicine and psychiatry
(and eventually the law) became the enemy, playing the role of
an Aztec priesthood or a Spanish Inquisition opposite the movement
s prophets, shamans, and sorcerers. The leader who came closest
to uniting all strands of the movement in his person was Timothy
Leary. Here the man, the moment, and the milieu found one another.
His case exemplified his own idea of set and setting as determinants
of the significance of the psychedelic experience. For him, it
was not only a metaphysical revelation but the source of a new
social role as chief prophet, Pied Piper, trip guide, ideologue,
and interpreter of the new consciousness. Leary filled Eric Hoffer's
requirements for a charismatic cult leader: "audacity and
a joy in defiance; an iron will...; faith in his destiny and
luck; contempt for the present...; a delight in symbols (spectacles
and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness" (McGlothlin 1974b,
p. 297). He was capable of speaking "as one who had authority,
and not as their scribes," but also capable of disarming
humility and self-directed irony. Huxley put it in different terms
in a letter to Osmond in 1962: Leary's behavior was "the
reaction of a mischievous Irish boy to the headmaster of his school.
One of these days the headmaster will lose patience.... I am very
fond of Tim, but why, oh why, does he have to be such an
ass?" (Bedford 1974, p. 717). Whether or not psychedelic
drugs expanded Leary's consciousness, the psychedelic movement
greatly expanded the range of his activities, providing new fields
for the display of his intellectual and forensic gifts, his charm,
boldness, and carelessness of consequences. His books, articles,
and lectures shaped the ideas of people who did not read themone
definition of broad intellectual influenceand his insolently
rebellious attitudes and free way of living were envied or regarded
as exemplary even by people who did not have the resources to
imitate them. He popularized the phrase "Turn on, tune in,
and drop out" and the expression "set and setting,"
and he rang the changes on these ideas beguilingly throughout
the early sixties.
In spite of a successful career as an academic psychologist, which
culminated in appointment to a research post at Harvard in 1958,
Leary had always been somewhat unconventional. A Harvard colleague
remembers him in the late 1950s as charming and cynical, contemptuous
of middle-class conformity, and delighting in forbidden acts like
sleeping with patients. Some of his colleagues even described
him as a psychopath, and he humorously accepted the designation
as a badge of honor. In those days Leary spoke of the "hybrid
vigor" of the cultural offspring of unusual social unionsdisparate
classes, for exampleand soon the psychedelic movement provided
him with opportunities to create his own hybrids (Slack 1974).
Leary was one of the proponents of a theory called transactional
psychology (elaborated by Eric Berne in Games People Play and
other books), which treated social roles and behavior as a series
of games, each with its own rules, rituals, strategies, and tactics.
Since Leary regarded social selves, including his own, with irony
and distrust, psychedelic drugs performed an apparent service
by dissolving the ego and "ending the Timothy Leary game."
Using the terminology of this theory, Leary proclaimed that the
drugs released people from the grip of the game-world and enabled
them to return and live in it without commitment or anxiety; they
could recognize its fundamentally unserious nature and preserve
the compassionate detachment of a Hindu or Buddhist saint. (Alan
Watts developed similar ideas starting directly from the study
of Indian religion.) Most people's lives, in this view, consisted
of absurd and futile rituals bound by restrictive rules of which
they remained unconscious unless they were liberated by the drugs.
The point was to recognize and delight in the fact that everything
was only play, universal forces playing in and through persons,
persons trying on roles and playing parts for the pleasure of
the game. When Leary said, "There is no such thing as personal
responsibility. It's a contradiction in terms" (Slack 1974,
p. 171), others might call him a psychopath but he was stating
a philosophical doctrine. This mixture of social criticism, straightforward
hedonism, and traditional Eastern religion became, mostly in diffuse
and vulgarized versions, the founding philosophy of the hippie
movement. Leary was not its only proponent, but he put its arguments
in the most brilliant and seductive form and set a conspicuous
example by public practice of its tenets.
The Timothy Leary game, if it did not end, at least began again
on a new field with more players the day he took psilocybin mushrooms
while participating in a Harvard Summer Study Project at Cuernavaca,
Mexico in the summer of 1960: "Five hours after eating the
mushrooms it was all changed. The revelation had come. The classic
vision. The full-blown conversion experience." (Leary 1968a,
p. 283). He returned to Harvard that fall, obtained pure psilocybin
(then recently synthesized for the first time by Hofmann) from
Sandoz, and began research and experimentation, a large part of
which consisted in taking the drug himself and giving it to colleagues,
friends, graduate students, and others, including inmates of a
state prison in a rehabilitation project that began in January
of 1961. A Harvard colleague, Richard Alpert, was converted and
became his ally. LSD was added to his armamentarium in November
1961, after more than a hundred psilocybin trips. Of this experience,
even more powerful than any produced by psilocybin, he wrote,
"We [he and Alpert] had moved beyond the game of psychology,
the game of trying to help people, and beyond the game of conventional
love relationships. We were quietly and serenely aware of too
much.... I have never recovered from that shattering ontological
confrontation. I 4ave never been able to take myself, my mind,
and the social world around me seriously.... From the date
of this session it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard,
that we would leave American society... tenderly, gently disregarding
the parochial social insanities" (Leary 1968a, pp. 255-256).
This gives some idea of the kind of effect LSD could have on those
prepared to abandon themselves to it.
The clinical detachment and scientific objectivity conventionally
recommended for evaluating drugs seemed to Leary and Alpert to
be worse than beside the point, in fact actively pernicious, in
interpreting the psychedelic experience; and such methods were
soon abandoned in informal group sessions that resembled academic
seminars or medical experiments less than a cross between religious
convocations and wild parties. As the center of so much attention
in those years of Kennedy's presidency, Harvard was an excellent
stage and pulpit; the fame of Leary and psychedelic drugs was
soon spreading not only on campus but throughout the country.
It was through the Harvard connection that LSD first gained the
attention of the mass media. Leary's provocative wit was guaranteed
to arouse interest and anger; an example is his and Alpert's reply
to a critical article in the Harvard Crimson: "Psychedelic
drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not
taken them" (La Barre 1964 [19S8], p. 2S2). Soon he was in
trouble with the Harvard authorities and the Massachusetts Food
and Drug Divisionthe headmaster was losing patience, as Huxley
had predictedand at the same time, he began to abandon his
commitment to the academic role or game. He had found a following
and, as he announced with a characteristic mixture of arrogance
and self-deprecating irony, decided that he had become a prophet
and might as well play the role full-time. By the spring of 1965,
when Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard in an atmosphere
of considerable publicity, they had in effect decided to abandon
the academic world anyway. The chairman of the Harvard Social
Relations Department declared, "They started out as good
sound scientists and now they've become cultists" (Geller
and Boas 1969, p. 166). He said that they were impulsive, insensitive,
and afflicted by a bland sense of superiority and a holy man syndrome
(Downing 1964, p. 165). By Leary s own estimate, he administered
psilocybin or LSD to 400 people from the fall of 1960 to the spring
of 196S (Geller and Boas 1969, p. 165).
In 1962 Leary and Alpert had founded an organization called the
International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In the spring
of 196S this group set up an institute in Mexico for the philosophical
and religious study of psychedelic drugs; it was deluged with
applications and then closed by the authorities after a month,
creating yet another wave of publicity. That summer Leary and
Alpert founded the Psychedelic Review, and an editorial
against LSD appeared in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, written by the head of the Harvard Health Services.
In the fall the Castalia Foundation (named after the utopian academy
in Hermann Hesse's novel The Class Bead Game) was established
on an estate at Millbrook, New York, owned by Billy Hitchcock,
an heir to the Mellon fortune; Millbrook continued to be Leary's
base of operations for several years and a more or less working
model of what came to be thought of as the psychedelic lifestyle
(see Kleps 1977). In 1966 the Castalia group formed a new organization
with the acronym L.S.D. (League for Spiritual Discovery); Leary
went on taking psychedelic drugs weekly, writing, traveling, presiding
over rites and celebrations, counseling and inspiring his friends
and followers, and generating both good and bad publicity of a
kind that created increasing interest in the drugs and in himself.
He was also intermittently harassed by the authorities, mostly
on marihuana charges, since there were no effective criminal laws
relating to LSD. Millbrook was raided by the police several times
(once, in March 1966, under the direction of prosecuting attorney
G. Gordon Liddy, later made famous by the Watergate scandal),
and Leary was also arrested for smuggling at the Mexican border
by customs officials.
The perpetual court cases gave him an aura of at least potential
martyrdom; but it is not clear in the name of what he would have
been martyred, since he put so little stock in principle or philosophical
consistency. His philosophy was originally apolitical or antipolitical;
he spoke of a revolution in consciousness, or, as he sometimes
called it, a neurological revolution, that would first make all
mere political or social change seem trivial and then eventually
create its own social forms. He moved on to a temporary rhetorical
alliance with political radicals in the late sixties. Finally,
in 1968, he was jailed in California on a marihuana charge; later,
he escaped from his minimum security prison with help from hippie
and radical friends, and spent some time in exile in Algeria and
Switzerland. He was extradited and spent more time in prison,
then was pardoned and released; he now lectures at colleges, where
he has abandoned political and drug proselytizing and talks about
the prospects for colonization of outer space. Whether he is seen
as a creative cultural impresario or simply as an intellectual
adventurer and opportunist, it is clear that Leary did not take
himself seriously enough to be the founder of a religion; his
charismatic qualities were not linked to any fixed beliefs in
a way that would provide a social movement with a direction. In
accordance with his playful philosophy, he was simply trying out
one role after another. His friend and supporter Alpert, now known
as Baba Ram Dass, went in a different direction, one much more
common for former users of psychedelic drugstoward the formal
practice of Indian religion.
By the mid-1960s, to paraphrase W. H. Auden s line about Freud,
LSD was no longer a drug but a whole climate of opinion. There
was a great variety of psychedelic scenes. Tom Wolfe observed
Leary's professed dedication to Eastern meditation, experienced
guides, and carefully arranged settings from the point of view
of the group led by the West Coast novelist Ken Kesey; he charged
the Harvard prophet and his friends with upper-middle-class respectability
and a flight from the contemporary America celebrated in the Kesey
group's emphasis on noise, bright colors, eccentric dress, motor
vehicles, flashy technology, and provocative public craziness.
If this is an incorrect description of Leary, who was no responsible
middle-class citizen, it does exemplify two aspects of the psychedelic
movement. For three or four years in the late 1960s, it was the
counterculture: a social world of its own with characteristic
food, dress, shops, nightclubs, music and visual arts, ways of
making a living, philosophical, religious, and political leaders
of various persuasions, as well as status distinctions and internal
rivalrieseverything but a productive economic basis. There
were the middle-class, middle-aged professional people meditating
in what Wolfe called their "Uptown Bohemian country retreats,"
Pranksters with their Day-Glo painted buses and bodies, rock musicians
with their high-living entourages and passionate audiences, runaways
panhandling on the streets of Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village,
rural commune and urban crash-pad dwellers, chemists concocting
familiar and new drugs in illicit laboratories.
There were psychedelic churches, ashrams, rock festivals, light
shows, posters, comic books and newspapers, psychedelic jargon
and slang. Every middle-sized city had its enclaves, and there
was also a drug culture touring circuit, with stops at Telegraph
Avenue in Berkeley, Haight Street in San Francisco, the East Village
in New York, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Amsterdam, Mexico, Morocco,
Afghanistan, India, Nepal. Everyone had his own idea of what was
meant by turning on, tuning in, and dropping outhis own set
and settingand the drug culture provided almost as many variations
in doctrine, attitude, and way of life, from rational and sedate
to lewd and violent, as the rest of American society. There was
the theologian Alan Watts, and there was the jailbird and murderer
Charles Manson.
Nevertheless, believing it faced a common enemy, the counterculture
had an appearance of unity, direction, and permanence; to some
it looked like the beginning of a transformation in consciousness
that would sweep the world. The Fillmore Auditorium, a psychedelic
ballroom in San Francisco, could be seen as "the throbbing
center of the universe. It was like the point from which radiated
out the sounds that moved the whole world" (Pope 1974, p.
55). Hunter Thompson writes, "San Francisco in the middle
sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe
it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but
no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch
that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner
of time and the world.... You could strike sparks anywhere. There
was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was
right, that we were winning.... Our energy would simply
prevail. There was no point in fightingon our side or
theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a
high and beautiful wave" (Thompson 1971, pp. 66-68).
In invigorating polemical exchanges, conservative medical authorities
or lawmen would declare the use and users of LSD to be sick and
dangerous, and psychedelic drug advocates would reply that it
was they, the established powers, who were sick and dangerous
rigid, repressed, afraid to confront their deepest selves and
see the futility of their lives, desperate to prevent others from
examining their lives and thereby escaping from repressive control.
Charges and countercharges like this gave the impression that
there really was a unified counterculture engaged in vigorous
nonviolent war with the established system. The spirit of rebellion
created by the black liberation movement and above all by the
war in Vietnam merged with that of the drug revolution and furthered
the illusion of community and solidarity.
Leary spoke for the drug culture:

In the current hassle over psychedelic plants and drugs, you are
witnessing a good-old-fashioned, traditional religious controversy.
On the one side the psychedelic visionaries, somewhat uncertain
about the validity of their revelations, embarrassedly speaking
in new tongues (there never is, you know, the satisfaction of
a sound, right academic language for the new vision of the Divine),
harassed by the knowledge of their own human frailty, surrounded
by the inevitable legion of eccentric would-be followers looking
for a new panacea, always in grave doubt about their own motivation(hero?
martyr? crank? crackpot?)always on the verge of losing their
material achievements(job, reputation, long-suffering wife,
conventional friends, parental approval); always under the fire
of the power-holders And on the other side the establishment (the
administrators, the police, the fund-granting foundations, the
job-givers) pronouncing their familiar lines in the drama ''Danger!
Madness! Unsound! Intellectual corruption of youth! Irreparable
damage! Cultism! (Leary 1968, pp. 56-57)

From the other side, a psychiatrist, Daniel X. Freedman, wrote
that the psychedelic prophets were victims of a delusional autonomy
and bland sense of superiority, protected themselves by using
the ego defense known as denial, and had a need to proselytize
in order to allay their own doubts: "It is interesting that
classifications of pathological outcomes of conversion (including
irresponsibility and omniscience) startlingly resemble patterns
we see with LSD.... Implied are unsolved problems with authority
figures. Salvation often involves renunciation of previous ties;
those who are saved must repetitively convince others in order
to diminish their own doubt, isolation, and guilt" (Freedman
1968, p. 338).
The power of psychedelic drugs to produce at least temporary adherence
to a new conception of oneself and a new way of life can be regarded
with an admiring eye, like Leary's, or a dubious eye, like Freedman's;
in any case, the power was at its height when the drugs were a
novelty. This "cultogenic" property, as it has been
awkwardly called, is embodied innocently in the Huichol ceremonial,
the peyote religion, and some of the psychedelic churches that
sprang up in the early sixties, as well as corruptly and satanically
in the Charles Manson family. It was well described by Wolfe in
his intimate account of Kesey's Merry Pranksters. Kesey s Acid
Test parties were a kind of religious rite with their own religious
art:

The Acid Tests were one of those outrages, one of those scandals
[the reference is to St. Paul's description of Christianity]
that create a new style or a new world view. Everyone clucks,
fumes, grinds their teeth over the bad taste, the bad morals,
the insolence, the vulgarity, the childishness, the lunacy, the
cruelty, the irresponsibility, the fraudulence... The Acid Tests
were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically
everything that has gone into it... Even details like psychedelic
poster art, the quasi-art nouveau swirls of lettering,
design, and vibrating colors, electro pastels and spectral Day-Glo,
came out of the Acid Tests Later other impresarios and performers
would recreate the Prankster styles with a sophistication the
Pranksters never dreamed of Art is not eternal, boys. The
posters became works of art in the accepted cultural tradition....
Others would do the mixed-media thing until it was pure ambrosial
candy for the brain with creamy filling every time To which Kesey
would say ''They know where it is, but they don't know
what it is." (Wolfe 1969 [1968], pp. 223-224)

Leary called himself a "high priest" and flattered drug
chemists and drug dealers by describing them as successors to
the medieval alchemists. Another term borrowed by the heresiarchs
of the psychedelic sects and also used scornfully by their enemies
was the Hindi guru, meaning spiritual teacher, a figure with elements
of priest, psychotherapist, and trip guide.
One formulation of the issue was Youth versus Age; most of the
drug users were young, and a Flower Child had to be, at least
in spirit. Leary flattered his followers this way: "The present
generation under the age of 25 is the wisest and holiest generation
that the human race has ever seen" (Leary 1968a, p. 46).
He wrote an essay with the title, "Hormonal Politics,"
proposing the unusual idea that the basic question in politics
was how much time you spent making love last week (Leary 1968
b, p. 168). In a cheerful short essay called "Start Your
Own Religion" (ibid., pp. 223-236), he adjured the user of
psychedelic drugs to consider himself a spiritual voyager and
not a naughty boy, but often it seemed that he meant to obscure
the distinction. He spoke of good vs. evil, underground vs. above
ground, and the free, ecstatic, moist, sensual, and funny life
forces vs. the dry, humorless, destructive antilife forces. He
wrote of the "evolutionary leap" the young had taken
by fruitful derangement of their nervous systems. They had experienced
more than the Buddha and Einstein, they were ambassadors from
the future, they had ended the 400-year bad trip that began with
the scientific revolution and the rise of industrial society (Leary
;968 a, pp. 161-162), and so on in that extravagant style. He
replied to the criticism that LSD was used indiscriminately and
for kicks by writing that it should be indiscriminate and
for kicks, like life itself (Leary 1968 a, p. 14).
The hippie movement constituted the mass following of the psychedelic
ideology. It began to gather force around ].965 and reached its
height between 1967 and 1969. Although the matter was often obscured
for tactical reasons, there is no doubt that the initiating element,
the sacrament, the symbolic center, the source of group identity
in hippie lives was the psychedelic drug trip. To drop out, you
had to turn on. It was not a question of how often the drugs were
used; sometimes once was enough, and many people experienced a
kind of cultural contact high without taking drugs at all. Earlier
bohemians had their unconventional dress, sexual and work habits,
hairstyles and political attitudes; what distinguished hippiedom
and expanded its population far beyond that of genuine literary
and artistic bohemias was simply the extra ingredient of LSD.
By democratizing visionary experiences, LSD made a mass phenomenon
of attitudes and ideas that had been, the property of solitary
mystics, esoteric religions, eccentric cults, or literary cliques.
Every teenager who had taken 500 micrograms of LSD could convince
himself, with the help of teachers like Leary, that he was in
some sense an equal of the Buddha or Einstein.
The hippie movement in its visions combined a theoretical benevolence
and gentleness with an interest in communitarian experiments,
the occult, magic, exotic ritual, and mysticism. It borrowed its
crazy-quilt of ideas from depth psychology, oriental religion,
anarchism, American Indian lore, and the Romantic and Beat literary
current of inspired spontaneity. I9liddle-class young people,
provided with a childhood free of the most obvious forms of coercion
and made self-conscious by the adolescent subculture and the youth
consumer market that supplied it, were unwilling to submit to
what they saw as the hypocrisies and rigidities demanded by adult
jobs and roles, the unfreedom of adult life; a society worried
about unemployment was willing to delay their entry into the job
market and prolong their adolescence. The implicit purpose of
the hippie style was to prolong the freedom and playfulness of
childhood as far as possible into adulthood: to make the culture
a youth culture. They rejected the accepted social definitions
of reason, progress, knowledge, and even reality; they proclaimed
their abandonment of the egocentrism and compulsiveness of the
technological world view. American society was seen as a dehumanizing,
commercialized air-conditioned nightmare, meanly conformist in
its manners and morals, hypocritical in its religion, murderous
and repressive in its politics; it outlawed the liberating psychedelic
drugs and approved of enslaving alcohol and nicotine. A transformed
way of life would be built on the intimations provided by LSD,
the "mind detergent" that purged the psyche and midwifed
a personal rebirth as the first step toward a new form of community.
The formula included self-realization, freedom from inhibition,
communal ecstasy, expanded awareness, cleansed perception, essential
rather than superficial religion, and a new spiritual order in
which Blake's "mind-forged manacles" would be broken
and our oneness with the universe recognized Hippies were expected
to withdraw from the economy of conspicuous consumption and competitive
emulation to live in holy poverty, scorning money, property, and
upward mobility. Like the Huichols, they would return through
psychedelic drugs to a lost state of innocence, a time before
time began when the creation was fresh and the earth a paradise.
They would turn away from the empty democratic political forms
of industrial society and organize themselves into "tribes,"
imitating the organic community of preliterate hunters and gatherers.
On the one hand they were young men and ladies of leisure, scornful
aristocrats rejecting the vulgarity and hypocrisy of mass culture;
on the other, they were self-made noble savages, or serene and
compassionate yogis. Their festivals, and indeed their lives,
were supposed to combine play and prayer and make the two indistinguishable.
The hairstyles, dress, manners, and language were partly a mark
of indifference to the established conventions, partly a deliberate
mockery and challenge. Instead of measuring out their lives with
coffee spoons, they proposed self-abandonment and sensual indulgence;
in place of secular humanism and political rationalism (revolutionary
or conservative), they preferred a farrago of mystical and prophetic
apolitical religionsZen, Sufism, yoga, Tantra, shamanism, Gnosticism.[2]
Hippies and their critics searched for historical analogies to
validate or invalidate this peculiar mixture of Asian notions
of serenity and passivity with American optimism and emphasis
on youth, which had its first incarnation in the Americanized
Zen Buddhism of the marihuana-smoking Beat Generation. Hippies
were proclaimed the successors of the Cynics, the early Christians
or Buddhists, Thoreau, St. Francis, antinomian religious sects,
the youth movements of German Romanticism, the literary bohemians
of the 1840s or the 1920s, or the mystery cults of the ancients;
they were said to have inherited the dream of the Land of Cockaigne
or Arcadia, or the tradition of American experiments in community
anarchy. "Hippie" itself was originally an outsider's
term, invented by journalists; insiders sometimes regarded it
as at best sympathetically condescending in the style of the mass
media, at the worst uncomprehendingly scornful. They often preferred
to call themselves "heads," implying superior awareness,
or even "freaks," with the implication that they were
mutants, hopeful monsters who represented the next stage in cultural
evolution. Some intelligent observers in fact agreed that here
was "a significant new culture aborning." (Roszak 1969,
p. 38). That, of course, was only the vision; the reality, as
always, was something else. In any case, what looks like a desirable
mutant from one point of view is simply a monstrosity from another.
So some sensitive outsiders, like cultivated Romans contemplating
a Hellenistic sect, regarded the whole phenomenon, even in its
most exalted and philosophical aspects, as a form of barbaric
enmity to reason and civilization, a sometimes sadly naive and
confused, sometimes aggressively coarse and brutal mixture of
fraud and folly, a compound of collective eccentricity and personal
aberration that could only be destructive.
The psychedelic culture had its characteristic public occasions
and assemblies: celebrations of equinoxes and solstices, be-ins,
rock concerts, and so on. Here, for example, is Wolfe's description
of the Love Festival held in Golden Gate Park on October 7, 1966,
the day the California law against LSD went into effect:

Thousands of heads piled in, in high costume, ringing bells, chanting,
dancing ecstatically, blowing their minds one way and another
and making their favorite satiric gesture to the cops, handing
them flowers, burying the bastids [sic] in tender fruity petals
of love. Oh Christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mind-blower,
thousands of high-loving heads out there messing up the minds
of the cops and everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria.
(Wolfe 1969 [l968], p. 827)

At about the same time a white-robed Leary, playing the prophet
game, presided over the founding rites of the League for Spiritual
Discovery in New York. Other characteristic events were Kesey
s Trips Festival in January of 1966, the Human Be-In in San Francisco
in January 1967 (a gathering of the tribes" with 20,000 participants),
and the Woodstock Rock Festival of the summer of 1969, with an
audience of more than 300,000, almost all under twenty-five.
More permanent meeting places were the psychedelic dance halls
and discotheques with their elaborate light and sound apparatus
designed to make the most of the drugs' sensory effects. In their
first year of operation the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom
in San Francisco had about a million customers (Marshall and Taylor
1967, p. 106). In places like these, as well as music festivals
and recording studios, the drug culture assimilated rock and roll.
If drugs were its most important commodity and commercial enterprise,
music was not far behind. The musicians and entrepreneurs of rock,
along with drug dealers, were its financial aristocrats, and much
of the rock music of the late sixties was inspired by psychedelic
experiences or designed to be heard under the influence of the
drugs. The surrealist imagery of song Iyrics and album covers
showed the influence even more unequivocally. A musical style
invented by a San Francisco group, the Grateful Dead, was called
acid rock; but for a few years most rock music was in a broader
sense acid rock, as is obvious from the titles and Iyrics of songs
like the Byrds' "Eight Miles High," The Jefferson Airplane's
"White Rabbit," Donovan's "Sunshine Superman, or
the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour and Tomorrow Never Knows,"
with its borrowings from a psychedelic Bible, the Tibetan Book
of the Dead:

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.It is not dying,
it is not dying.Lay down all thought, surrender to the void.
It is shining, it is shiningThat you may see the meaning of
within.It is being, it is being.

Psychedelic mixed-media art imitated the synesthesia of the drug
experience by means of stroboscopic lights, movies, slide projections,
scents, shadows, and deafening music used to overwhelm the senses
and derange habitual modes of perception. Psychedelic posters
and paintings evoked drug visions with their garish colors, biomorphic
forms, crowded detail, and surrealist mythological imageryonly
the emotional intensity and the incessant movement and change
could not be reproduced. Films like Easy Rider and the
Beatles' animated cartoon Yellow Submarine were another
kind of visual celebration of the drug experience. Rock music
and other products with a hippie flavor entered the larger culture,
often commercialized and trivialized in the form of imitation
"psychedelic" T-shirts, pens, and so on. The drug culture
developed a technical terminology and slang out of a mixture of
black dialect, older street drug talk, Eastern religious language,
and its own inventions. It gave currency to expressions like turned
on, straight, freak, freaked out, stoned, tripping, tripped out,
spaced out, far out, flower power, ego trip, hit, into, mike,
plastic, going with the flow, laying one's trip on someone, game-playing,
mind-blowing, mind games, bring-down, energy, centering, acid,
acidhead, good trip, bum trip, horror show, drop a cap or tab,
karma, samsara, mantra, groovy, rapping, crash, downer, flash,
scene, vibes, great white light, doing your thing, going through
changes, uptight, getting into spaces, wiped out, where it's at,
high, ball, zap, rush, and so on. Many old terms like "travel
agent" took on new meanings that were half in-jokes and half
esoteric cult-signs.
The alleged enemy was conformist society, the straight world,
adults, medical authorities, the government, the law, and so ona
situation well defined in the title of a book by Nicholas von
Hoffman: We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against. But
things were not so simple. America confronted the hippies with
a mixture of attraction and revulsion summed up in the two public
faces of the lazy, dirty, hedonistic, promiscuous, and parasitical
dope fiend and the radiantly angelic product of the love generation.
The hippies made conventional society anxious but also touched
its imagination. After all, some of them were the sons and daughters
of its pillars. Favorable and unfavorable publicity in the mass
media were equally effective in spreading the use of psychedelic
drugs. Paeans to the gentleness, peaceableness, and sexual openness
of the flower children made recruits for the drug culture; reports
of suicides, fatal falls, or psychotic reactions were discounted
as establishment propaganda, and it was even said (especially
by Leary) that scare publicity and medical mishandling caused
most bad drug reactions. Cops-and-robbers stories about drug
arrests contributed to the exhilarating sense of forbidden adventure.
Students surveyed at a high school in California in 1967, when
asked whom they would trust as the narrator of an anti-LSD film,
answered "no one" (Braden 1970, p. 413): a common effect
of adverse drug publicity in the sixties on young people who understood
how much hypocrisy, displacement, and projection went into adult
condemnations. And yet it was partly the way some adults flattered
them as spiritual and social innovators that made young drug users
so confident of their judgment. Some professional peoplesociologists,
psychologists, journalists, clergymenwere so excited by the
hippies' proclamations of messianic transcendence and social revolution
that they abandoned their own judgment and invested disappointed
hopes for drastic and immediate change in a movement that made
promises far beyond its capacities.
Amid the mixture of hostility and approbation that greeted the
hippies and their drugs, the law hesitated for a while and then
came down on the side of repression. In the early days psychedelic
drugs were not treated with the peculiar moralistic severity reserved
for substances classified as "narcotics" (including,
ironically, the much milder marihuana). Until 1963 LSD, mescaline,
and psilocybin were easy to obtain for clinical and experimental
research; and until 1966 there were no state or federal criminal
penalties for unauthorized possession, manufacture, and sale.
Only after 1966, when Sandoz took its LSD off the market in response
to the new laws and the new public atmosphere, was most of the
LSD in circulation manufactured in illicit laboratories. Under
the present comprehensive federal drug law, which was enacted
in 1970, most "hallucinogens" including marihuana are
classified as drugs with a high potential for abuse and no current
medical use; possession for personal use is a misdemeanor, unauthorized
manufacture or sale a felony. State laws are similar to the federal
law.
One familiar effect of illegality is a decline in drug purity
and quality. A common complaint, voiced by Kesey, Michael Hollingshead
(the man who introduced LSD to Leary), and other connoisseurs,
is that the illicit drug available after 1966 was not the same
as pure Sandoz LSD: the trip provided by illicit LSD was a chaotic,
mind-shattering, physically and emotionally exhausting roller
coaster ride instead of a serene cruise with a clear view of Reality.
The decline of the psychedelic movement has even been attributed
to the loss of its sacrament. The irony of this is that it implies
the inferiority of the natural plant form, which always contains
a mixture of alkaloids; it also makes the purity of an anti-technological
religious vision dependent on precision technology. What does
the evidence show?
According to data compiled by the PharmChem Research Foundation,
a California organization, the only psychedelic drugs now generally
available on the street are LSD, PCP, and to a lesser extent MDA.
Almost no one takes the trouble to manufacture mescaline or psilocybin,
because their effects resemble those of LSD and the much larger
amounts required make the expense too great. Mescaline is available
only in the form of peyote buttons and psilocybin only in the
form of psychedelic mushrooms, which have been discovered growing
all over the United States; they are increasingly sought after
in the wild (see Pollock 1975 a; Weil 1977 a) and, with difficulty,
can also be cultivated (see Oss and Oeric 1976). (Many "psilocybin
mushrooms," incidentally, are just commercial mushrooms laced
with LSD.) Anything labeled as pure or synthetic mescaline, psilocybin,
or tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is almost certainly either LSD or
PCP, or else contains no drug. Some chemicals closely related
to LSD have been synthesized to sidestep the law; the one most
often available is the acetylated variant, ALD-52, which is almost
as potent as LSD itself. As for the quality of illicit LSD, adulterants
and substitutes must be distinguished from products of improper
synthesis. Since the variable physical and psychological effects
of LSD sometimes resemble those of strychnine, belladonna, or
amphetamine, there are rumors that illicit LSD often contains
these substances. But laboratory analysis, especially the work
of the PharmChem Research Foundation, shows that illicit LSD rarely
contains adulterants, although the advertised dose is usually
two to five times the actual one. The major problem is impurities
that are by-products of careless or inadequate synthesis.
In the manufacturing process, ergotamine or other ergot alkaloids
are reduced to Iysergic acid (d-lysergic acid monohydrate), which
is then converted to LSD. The whole procedure, and especially
the last stage, in which LSD is separated from iso-LSD by chromatography,
is rather delicate; it requires skill and good equipment. The
government has tried to cut off the supply of chemical precursors;
but illicit chemists are usually able to obtain enough, because
several ergot derivatives are used as medicines and the quantities
needed are small by one estimate, 70 kg of ergotamine tartrate
is enough to supply the American LSD market for a year (McGlothlin
1974 b). The only impurity regularly found by the PharmChem Laboratory,
aside from occasional traces of ergotamine, is iso-LSD: it is
very similar to LSD in chemical structure (the same atoms in a
slightly different arrangement) but pharmacologically inactive.
It is rarely present in a proportion of more than 15 percent and
appears to have no effect on the drug action. So street LSD seems
to be reasonably pure.
This assumption has been challenged, however. According to the
well-known drug chemist A. T. Shulgin, for example, the methods
used by PharmChem cannot reveal certain ergot derivatives and
other substances that may be pharmacologically active. Another
problem is that LSD must be stored away from the influence of
light and the oxygen in the air; the breakdown product of its
exposure to light, lumi-LSD, is probably not distinguishable from
active LSD by PharmChem's methods. But the significance of impurities
is very questionable. No other drug is as potent as LSD, and it
is hard to see how microgram quantities of much less powerful
substances could modify its effect. A mere deterioration in potency
would not affect the nature of the experience. The insistence
that everything went bad when the Sandoz product was removed from
the market probably reflects not a real pharmacological difference
but the illusion that all trips should be good trips unless something
is seriously wrong with either the drug or its user. By not admitting
that the effects of LSD can sometimes be chaotic, painful, or
terrifying, the disillusioned former user may justify his apostasy
without impugning the magical virtue of the sacrament itself.
LSD is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, and the small amounts
needed can be stored in any number of ways. For example, painting
it onto the fingernails and impregnating the cloth of a man's
suit have been used for smuggling. In the early sixties sugar
cubes were soaked in LSD, but this practice no longer exists.
The most common forms today are blotter (impregnated paper), microdot
(dried droplets on paper), "windowpane" or "clear
light" (gelatin sheets), powder, and tablets. Sometimes a
chemist identifies his product by a trademark like a particular
color or symbol: in the sixties there was Orange Sunshine, and
later names include White Rabbit and Blue Comet. The wholesale
price in 1972 was $500 to $800 a gram; in 1977 it was about $2500
a gram, or twenty-five cents for a 100-microgram dose. The retail
price in 1977 was between one and three dollars for a dose containing
from 50 to 200 micrograms. (The average dose is 75 micrograms.)
Since LSD is not a drug of habitfew people use it even as often
as once a monththe cost is usually no obstacle to anyone who
wants it. In 1972 it was estimated that sales in the United States
amounted to $9,000,000 at the bulk level and $245,000,000 at retail
for a total of 15 kilograms or 35 pounds. Since prices have tripled
or quadrupled, this figure is now probably higher; but the LSD
traffic is still far less lucrative than the trade in heroin,
cocaine, amphetamines, barbiturates, or marihuana.
How much LSD has been or is being used? Life magazine estimated
in.1966 that a million people had taken mescaline, LSD, or psilocybin;
the FDA seized a million illegal doses in 1967 (Geller and Boas
1969, p. 180); in December 1967, the legendary psychedelic chemist
Owsley (Augustus Owsley Stanley, III), patron of Kesey and the
Grateful Dead rock group, was arrested holding 200 grams of LSD,
or a million 200-microgram doses, as well as a large quantity
of DOM (STP); the estimated production capacity of illicit laboratories
uncovered by the authorities in 1967 was 40,000,000 doses (Brecher
1972, p. S66); in 1971 it was estimated that 5,000,000 Americans
had used LSD (McGlothlin 1975).
There is a widespread impression that all of this is past, that
in the late sixties everyone was taking psychedelic drugs and
by the late seventies no one was. As early as 1971, Hunter Thompson
wrote, They are still burning the taxpayers for thousands of dollars
to make films about 'the dangers of LSD,' at a time when acid
is widely knownto everybody but the copsto be the Studebaker
of the drug market; the popularity of psychedelics has fallen
off so drastically that most volume dealers no longer even handle
quality acid or mescaline except as a favor to special customers:
Mainly jaded, over-thirty drug dilettanteslike me, and my attorney"
(Thompson 1971, p. 201). But if the estimate of a total production
of 15 kilograms is accepted, in 1972 150,000,000 hundred-microgram
doses were soldcertainly not as much of a decline as Thompson
implies. Actually, it appears that almost as many people are experimenting
with psychedelic drugs now as in the late sixties, but fewer are
taking them habitually, trying to build a vision of the universe
and a way of life on them, or suffering unexpected disastrous
reactions. The novelty is gone, their limitations and dangers
are better understood and their virtues easier to put into perspective;
as often happens after a new drug has been on the scene awhile,
epidemic abuse has stopped. Culturally, LSD is not now a major
signal of rebellion or cause for alarm any more than long hair
on men.
Some statistics are appropriate here. Since 1968, surveys of LSD
use have been conducted among high school seniors in San Mateo
County, California, which is in the San Francisco Bay area, a
center of the drug culture. On a questionnaire asking how often
they had taken LSD in the last twelve months, students gave about
the same answers in 1974 as they gave in 1968 when publicity about
LSD was at its height. In 1968, 18 percent had used LSD at least
once, and 8 percent had used it ten or more times; in 1974 these
figures were 23 percent and 9 percent. The high point was 1972,
when the answers were 25 percent and 11 percent (McGlothlin 1975).
At the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, in September 1967,
85 percent of the patients had used LSD at least once, and 67
percent had used it in the previous month; in September 1972,
84 percent had used it at least once, but only 30 percent in the
previous month (Eagle 1975). Fifteen to 20 percent of the undergraduates
in the class of 1969 at "an Eastern university, apparently
Harvard, had taken LSD (Pope 1971, p. 7). A 1970 study of 5,482
Army enlisted men showed that 7 percent had used LSD (Black et
al. 1970).
A study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse based on information
collected from October 1974 to May 1975 from a sample of 2,500
men in their twenties shows the following: Twenty-two percent
of them had used psychedelic drugs; 10 percent had used them ten
or more times; only 23 percent of those who had used them had
done so in the previous year, and only 8 percent in the previous
month. Seven percent of the sample, or 34 percent of those who
had ever used psychedelic drugs, used them between 1974 and 1975
and therefore were "current users"; by extrapolation,
1,370,000 men in their twenties qualified for this designation.
The prevalence of use reached a high of 10 percent in 1972 and
declined to 6 percent by 1974; psychedelics were the only drugs
showing such a decline. Men born between 1952 and 1954, the youngest
in the sample, had the highest rate of useabout 30 percent;
of men born in 1944, only 6 percent had ever taken the drugs.
Thirty-two percent of the sample said psychedelic drugs were easy
to obtain, and 38 percent said it was difficult but possible.
Twenty percent of the users reported some ill effects; 35 percent
of all users and 48 percent of those who used the drugs ten or
more times thought the overall effect good; 1.3 percent of all
usersseven men in the samplehad been treated for problems
arising from psychedelic drugs. (The term "psychedelic drugs'
was not defined, and to some people it may have meant PCP as well
as LSD.) (O Donnell et al. 1976.)
The impression of a continuing decline in use is confirmed by
other studies. A Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) survey indicated
that 4.3 percent of youths aged between 12 and 17 in 1974, and
2.8 percent of youths in that age group in 1975 had taken psychedelic
drugs; for adults, the figures were 1.5 percent and 1.1 percent
(Strategy Council 1976, p. 15). The National Survey on Drug
Abuse: 1977, published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse
and based on a sample of 4,594 subjects, shows that 6 percent
of the total population of the United States over the age of twelve,
about 10,000,000 people, have used hallucinogenic drugs; about
0.7 percent (1,140,000) are current users. In the 18 to 25 age
group, 20 percent have used hallucinogens and 2 percent are current
users (National Survey 1977).
There is now a stable pattern: a small but not negligible minority
of young people in their teens and early twenties, including a
relatively large proportion of the undergraduates at academically
selective colleges, take LSD several times over a period of a
year or two and then stop. Very few use it continually or go on
using it for long. (Thompson is wrong in supposing that most users
are "jaded, over-thirty drug dilettantes'-trying to recapture
the excitement of the mid-1960s.) The only psychedelic drugs still
rising in popularity (if PCP is not considered a true psychedelic)
are MDA and psilocybin mushrooms, both prized for gentleness.
Psychedelic drugs, then, are still with us, but the psychedelic
movement has disappeared. Its unity proved to be spurious, its
staying power a false hope. As Thompson regretfully observes,

This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around
America selling consciousness expansion without ever giving a
thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait
for all the people who took him too seriously... Not that they
didn't deserve it No doubt they all Got What was coming To Them
All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could
buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit But their loss
and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the
central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create
... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who
never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid
Culture the desperate assumption that somebodyor at least some
forceis tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.
" (Thompson 1971, pp. 78-179)

Psychedelic drugs could sustain cults but not a culture; the hippies
could not live up to their own hopes any more than they could
justify the fears of their enemies. From the start the movement
was amorphous, muddled, with great variations in participation
and commitment. Occasional masters or gurus, often older men,
provided philosophical justifications and political guidance;
a few hippies were organized into communes and tribes and manned
the institutions of the culture; but many were dropouts, some
of them runaways, who drifted into the life with no clear conception
of what they wanted or were rejecting and drifted out again in
a few years after succeeding or failing in the transition to adulthood;
and an even larger number were never more than "weekend"
or "plastic" hippies, tourists wearing native garb whose
idea of the scene was derived from psychedelic travel posters.
Most of the young people who might once have been called hippies
by the mass media or even described themselves that way never
grasped much more than an opportunity to find drugs, sex, excitement,
freedom from rules and restrictions, or, most touchingly, a home
and family away from their homes and families. They were "the
simple hippies, the stray teeny-boppers, the runaways, the summer
dropoutsthe micro-organisms without power of locomotion that
hung in the heavy water pool of Haight-Ashbury waiting for the
more complex creatures to inhale them into their mouths and ingest
them into their bellies where they could be food'-(von Hoffman
1968, p. 193)and, if they did not find their way out, potential
victims for a man like Charles Manson.
Since there was less than met the Day-Glo-bedazzled eye to start
with, the inevitable decline should have been no surprise. But
in fact it proved desperately and unreasonably disappointing.
As Hunter Thompson testified, it left behind an inarticulate sense
that some irrecoverable significance, some unique opportunity
for transcendence and rebirth, had been lost; this was the social
counterpart of the LSD user's emotions on returning from a psychedelic
voyage. A participant wrote in the late 1960s that 'hate and love
seem to be merging in a sense of cosmic failure, a pervasive feeling
that everything is disintegrating, including the counter-culture
itself, and that we really have nowhere to go." (Goldman
1971, p. 159). This feeling can only seem sentimental, far in
excess of its object, without some knowledge of the transformations
the mind undergoes through LSD.
As the disintegration proceeded, pieces picked themselves up and
moved off in various directions, which can be represented symbolically
by Methedrine, Marxism (or Maoism), Marihuana, and Meditation.
Progressing from psychedelic drugs to intravenous injection of
Methedrine (methamphetamine) and then addiction to depressants
(alcohol, barbiturates, and heroin) was one form of the descent
into despair and misery that revealed how much in the drug culture
had always been pathological. The high language about love and
community emanating from the few articulate leaders admired by
sympathetic observers obscured a great deal of sordid reality.
The hippie world's benign tolerance for eccentricity, its refusal
to judge, make rules, or exclude, and its programmatic lack of
discipline had attracted unstable persons who not only would not
but could not make lives for themselves in straight societyfrom
adolescents in turmoil to borderline psychotics like Charles Manson
and antisocial characters like the Hell s Angels. The drug culture
had no resources to protect itself against those who joined it
to disguise, justify, or alleviate their disturbed conditions.
For the same reasons it was easily corrupted by drug dealers'
profiteering and co-opted by commercial exploitation of its superficial
symbols; in part it was created by newspaper and television publicity,
and its relationship with the mass media, both orthodox and "underground,"
was intimately symbiotic. Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in 1968:

The advertising campaign which sold acid has to be among the great
feats of American merchandising.... The dope style is more than
empty inventive facilitythe creativity of the account executive.
It carries meaning at many levels. The most obvious has been using
it to connect the product, as do automobile manufacturers, with
youth and modernity; but like Avis, except more successfully,
the dope industry identifies its merchandise with the deeper emotions.
Avis uses the underdog theme. The dope pushers connect their stuff
with nothing less than God, infinity, eternal truth, morality,
every soteriological value the society has.... The mass media
... are ill-adapted to picking up and describing complex social
phenomena. This is one reason they become the unknowing means
of dope advertising.... Dope was associated with ideas which have
no necessary connection with the dope business the sharing, the
search for community, the looking for an alternate way of life,
the love and flower-power themes. (von Hoffman 1968, pp. 42-44)

Psychedelic ideology rejected the coercive mechanisms of society
on principle; it permitted no systematic distinction between inspired
originality, eccentricity, and madness, or between a capacity
to transcend the demands of routine social adjustments and an
inability to live up to them. The same improvisatory and happy-go-lucky
attitudes that gave the drug culture its charmits childlike
or childish aspectalso meant disorganization and formlessness;
the playful hippie ethic, which corresponded to Leary's ideas
about the game-nature of ordinary life, could not sustain permanent
institutions because it did not recognize steadfastness, discipline,
and responsibility as autonomous virtues. Hippies could be endearing
and sporadically inventive, but they often acted like spoiled
children, and one of their defining characteristics was unreliability.
Problems requiring concentration or sustained effort were often
dismissed irritably with the word "hassle." Man cannot
live by drugs alone, and except for the drug trade, economic dependence
on the ostensibly scorned straight society was unavoidable; sometimes
the munificent parent of one resident would be supporting a whole
commune. The psychological community of a collective LSD trip
was inadequate as a model for genuine communities; it suggested
no working arrangements for ordinary life.
The drug culture's downward path is retraced in detail in Love
Needs Care, David E. Smith's and John Luce's chronicle of
the rise and decline of the Haight-Ashbury hippie community from
1965 to 1969. Haight-Ashbury became a center of the counterculture
in 1965 with the opening of a psychedelic shop selling drug paraphernalia.
It was enriched by an influx from the nearby North Beach area
of Beat Generation fame, and attracted the attention of the mass
media after the Be-In or Gathering of the Tribes in Golden Gate
Park in January 1967. The press spread rumors that 100,000 migrants
would be coming that summer. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy
that attracted many young people to the dubiously named Summer
of Love, sometimes regarded as the flood tide of the drug culture.
If it was, the ebb began immediately and was precipitous; by January
of 1968 most of the flower children had abandoned the scene and
it was dominated by speed freaks, addicts, alcoholics, motorcycle
hoodlums, and the teenage runaways and schizoid or inadequate
personalities they preyed on. Hepatitis, bronchitis, venereal
disease, decayed teeth, malnutrition, and untreated cuts and burns,
always problems in urban hippie enclaves, had become pervasive
(Smith and Luce 1971).
Haight Street served as a kind of laboratory that provided advance
signals of the consequences of tendencies implicit in the movement
from the start. The early rural communes, for example, unable
to exclude or reject anyone and incapable of managing their affairs,
tended to fall apart in chaos (see Yablonsky 1968). The Woodstock
Rock Festival of 1969 and the talk of a Woodstock Nation for years
afterward seemed to prove that the counterculture still had some
life. But Woodstock was mainly a gathering of "plastic hippies":
middle-class young people on vacation, many of whom lived with
their parents or in college dormitories. The Altamont Rock Festival
of 1970, with its murderous culmination, was sometimes proclaimed
to be the counterculture's final self-inflicted blow. But the
problems had been inherent from the start. Charles Manson had
been taking LSD with his "family" in Haight-Ashbury
during the Summer of Love, and the summer of Woodstock was also
the summer of the Tate and LaBianca murders. Robert Stone s prizewinning
novel Dog Soldiers (197S) conveys the atmosphere of desolation
left in some regions by the death of the counterculture; the plot
centers on heroin smuggling, the dream of psychedelic utopia is
represented by a pathetic remnant in a New Mexico commune, and
the only winners are coolly manipulative cynics with no cultural
commitments at all. Everything about Manson, including the form
his delusions took, was a perfect malicious caricature of hippie
beliefs and the hippie way of life. The world of Dog Soldiers
was the next stage.
Chaos, crime, and addictive drugs were one way out; another direction
was radical politics. Relations between cultural and political
revolutionaries had always been strained. The general tendency
of the hippie movement was apolitical or antipolitical: Leary's
notion of neurological politics meant no politics at all in the
conventional sense; if each person changed himself, the sum of
all the individual conversions would somehow amount to a new social
order. The protest implicit in being tuned-in and dropped-out
was not easy to reconcile with ordinary political protest. Wolfe
describes Kesey's attitude toward a demonstration against the
Vietnam War: "Come rally against the war in Vietnam. From
the cosmic vantage point the Pranksters had reached, there were
so many reasons why this little charade was pathetic, they didn't
know where to begin" (Wolfe 1969 [1968] p. 192). When the
day came, Kesey's antics dampened the militant mood of the demonstrators.
To many people psychedelic drugs seemed the most important thing
that had ever happened to them, and political issues were no more
significant to someone on an LSD trip than they are in dreams.
The drug made political quarrels seem trivial and political action
ephemeral and foolish; nothing that lay between the agonizingly
personal and the grandly cosmic really mattered. Radicals naturally
complained that retreat into a drugged dream-world was incompatible
with any kind of politics, however broadly interpreted; and they
took the hippies' intimate relationship with the mass media and
technological capitalism as proof of how easily a merely cosmic
revolution could be absorbed by the dominant social system.
But traditional affinities between bohemianism and dissenting
political activism were also present. New Left philosophers like
Herbert Marcuse promoted the notion of altering the cultural context
of politics to overturn a form of domination that was not just
externally oppressive but corrupting to the very heart and soul
of its victims. The new radicals of the sixties also had in common
with the hippies an interest in participatory democracy, and the
political use of the idea of alienation was similar to the counterculture's
critique of industrial society. Most important, there was (or
seemed to be) a common enemy. The underground press was a mixture
of rude radical politics and fantastic hippie nonpolitics, aimed
at being as offensive as possible to the sensibilities of straight
society. Hippies and radicals were expressing the same disgust
in different ways. The convergence was closest from 1968 to 1971,
at the height of campus rebellion and Vietnam War protest, as
some of the undissipated rebellious energies of the disintegrating
drug culture were diverted into politics. Abbie Hoffman and others
founded the Youth International Party or Yippies in 1968 as a
kind of politicized Merry Pranksters. During the conspiracy trial
for the demonstration at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Hoffman
and his fellow defendant Jerry Rubin, with the cooperation of
the judge, aimed at undermining the decorum of the legal system
to destroy its authority. But this hippie-radical alliance proved
to be a temporary phase too. The underground newspapers became
more respectable, or more straightforwardly political, or they
disappeared; the Vietnam War ended, and mass demonstrations were
no longer available to provide an opportunity for displays of
New Left and hippie theatricality. The careers of Tim Leary and
Eldridge Cleaver suggest how this whole constellation has disappeared:
they started from separate points in drug proselytizing and political
radicalism, became allies for a short time in the late sixties,
and now, after imprisonment, exile, and further vicissitudes,
have given up both drugs and radical politics.
Methedrine and Marxism indicate two directions; marihuana represents
a third. Radical politics or addictive drugs absorbed only a few
of the people who had temporarily assumed the habits and language
of the counterculture; most of them returned to more or less conventional
lives. As usual after a conversion, there was much backsliding.
Even for those who did not abandon them, psychedelic drugs ceased
to imply cultural radicalism. LSD was taken more casually, for
pleasure, without apocalyptic expectations; often its more profound
effects were deliberately suppressed:

There are like six people sitting in a room tripping, and grooving
on the pretty colors, and suddenly Jane starts getting into something
heavy. She begins to realize that acid is a bigger thing than
just seeing colors, and she begins to get deep into it and get
frightened. Then somebody looks over and grins and says, "Whassa
matta, Jane, you freaking out?" And either she snaps back
into seeing the colors thing or she gets real frightened and never
takes acid again. (Pope 1971, p. 36)

But, as this quotation indicates, LSD was not a reliable pleasure
drug: ecstasy is not fun. People who used psychedelic drugs mainly
for what they defined as pleasure tended to stop sooner than those
who had more serious and complex purposes. Illicit drug users
looking for something that would not disrupt their normal routines
returned to substances like marihuana and cocaine, which have
reliably euphoric effects and do not alter consciousness too much.
Both have become increasingly acceptable as everyday social drugs;
they are used simply to feel good, and not as a source of cultural
identity. The magazine High Times is the Playboy of
these new drug users. Despite some halfhearted counterculture
rhetoric, its casual tone is very different from the rage and
exaltation of the drug-culture press of the 1960s, and its readers
no more constitute a subculture than do readers of Gourmet
or whiskey drinkers. Psychedelic drugs play a relatively small
part in their lives.
Everything is back to normal, then; but normality itself is different,
and not only in the increasing acceptability of marihuana as a
pleasure drug. As the epithet "mind detergent" implies,
in some circumstances LSD had a kind of brainwashing power; it
could induce the feeling of having achieved a new identity through
death and rebirth of the self. Even after this feeling faded,
it often seemed that nothing would ever be quite the same again.
The psychedelic voyage, like any adventure, changed the traveler.
There were subtle differences in the sensibilities and interests
of LSD users who turned off and dropped back in; they can be symbolized
by Meditation, the fourth direction we have named for former followers
of the psychedelic movement.
Transcendental Meditation is the simplest and most popular of
the therapies and religious techniques sometimes described as
transcendental or mystical. Most had existed long before psychedelic
drugs became popularsome for thousands of yearsbut the residue
of the psychedelic experience created an enormous new interest
in them. Spokesmen for the drug culture very early began to refer
to the danger of emphasizing LSD itself too much. Kesey was one
of the first: "What I told the hippies was that LSD can be
a door that one uses to open his mind to new realms of experience,
but many hippies are using it just to keep going through the door
over and over again, without trying to learn anything from it
(Wolfe 1969 [1968], p. 201). Ram Dass said in 1970, "I think
LSD is making itself obsolete. All acid does is show you the possibility
of another type of consciousness and give you hope. But your own
impurities keep bringing you down.... After a while you dig that
if you want to stay high, you have to work on yourself"
(Playboy Panel 1970, p. 201). In a 1968 study of Berkeley and
Haight-Ashbury LSD users, half of them said they would give up
the drug on the advice of a trusted mystic (Cohen 1973). The most
common reason why people stopped using LSD, more common than worry
about mental and physical health and far more common than fear
of legal penalties, was the belief that LSD itself had enabled
them to go "beyond" it, by transcending the need for
it.
The psychedelic movement did not create the revolution it had
promised, but it was more than a brief trip, a Ghost Dance for
white middle-class youth. Many of the several million people who
used LSD never abandoned the idea that in some sense they had
achieved expanded awareness. They believed they had understood
for the first time what the sages of prescientific and antiscientific
traditions were talking about:

Many people in the acid world have taken up the occult sciences,
I Ching, tarot cards, astrology, and numerology Their interest
flows from their acid experiences which, they believe, have given
them new sensitivities and glimpses of ways of knowing and feeling
that the categorical rationalism of the west fails to pick up
or even denies.... Larry [a former graduate student in mathematics]
now views his academic studies as denaturedinhuman beside the
important points of life. Acid set him to reading Eastern religion
and put him in pursuit of cabbalistic learning. (von Hoffman 968,
p. 188)

Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental territories previously
explored only by small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers,
mainly religious mystics. Most of the tourists simply returned
with a memory of having seen something important but no idea how
to interpret it or incorporate it into their lives. But some decided
to make their own attempts at exploration without drugs, and they
discovered that religious traditions had the best mapsespecially
the religions of India. The drugs whetted metaphysical appetites
that Eastern religion promised to satisfy. This project had great
advantages over the drug culture in seriousness and permanence.
Eastern gurus were relatively immune to the curiosity of the mass
media or condescending sociological expertise: they were neither
sensational enough (since sex and drugs were not involved) nor
easily subject to analysis on Western terms. Their rules, prohibitions,
and insistence on arduous training were a relief to recruits weary
of the drug culture's indiscipline and its anarchy of standards.
Young people who had never learned self-discipline or even considered
it important now discovered that it could order and enrich their
lives; this may have mattered more than any of the specific spiritual
techniques in maintaining a sense of community and psychological
stability.
There were other factors as well. One perceptive observer has
identified a common goal of detoxification on the journey
to the East. To realize the ideals of simplicity and naturalness
suggested but not achieved by the drug culture, it was necessary
to get rid of technical aids that were seen as impure and ultimately
in some sense poisonous. Many of those who turned to Eastern disciplines
came to regard drugs as pollutants that overload the senses, distract
the mind, and prevent the user from attaining the goals they allow
him to glimpse. They were seen as dangerous and somehow fraudulent,
artificial in a bad sense, like many other chemicals in the air
of industrial society. People who now sought spontaneity and self-transcendence
in all their experience could no longer tolerate confining them
to unusual chemically induced states, especially ones that depended
on drug technology. So doubts about Western science and industry
already present in the drug culture, as well as the concern for
purity and wholeness represented by the ecology movement, led
to a rejection of psychedelic drugs (Pope 1974; see also Cox 1977).
The novelist and explorer Peter Matthiessen described his passage
beyond LSD:

I never saw drugs as a path, far less as a way of life, but for
the next ten years I used them regularlymostly L8D but also
mescaline and psilocybin. The journeys were all scaring, often
beautiful, often grotesque, and here and there a blissful passage
was attained that in my ignorance I took for religious experience....
I had bad trips, too, but they were rare; most were magic shows,
mysterious, enthralling After eacheven the bad onesI seemed
to go more lightly on my way, leaving behind old residues of rage
and pain. Whether joyful or dark, the drug vision can be astonishing,
but eventually this vision will repeat itself, until even the
magic show grows boring; for me this occurred in the late sixties,
by which time D and I had already turned to zen.
Now those psychedelic years seem far away; I neither miss them
nor regret them. Drugs can clear away the past and enhance the
present; toward the inner garden, they can only point the way
Lacking the grit of discipline and insight, the drug vision remains
a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life. Old
mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent
forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the "I"
from true experience of the infinite within us. (Matthiessen 978,
pp. 44, 47)

Liberal capitalist industrial society has absorbed a cultural
movement that implausibly promised to transform it out of recognition.
This absorptive or adaptive capacity has been decried by philosophers
like Marcuse who consider it a means of neutralizing all opposition
and emptying it of meaning. But in fact society to some extent
becomes what it consumes; the adaptation has not been all on one
side, and the drug culture has modified habits and ways of thinking
in more important matters than marihuana smoking or long hair.
Forays across the border of ordinary waking awareness are no longer
merely a hobby for cranks and fringe groups or spontaneous individual
adventures without public status. Psychedelic drugs made common
coin of the term 'altered states of consciousness" by greatly
simplifying access to these states and therefore promoting their
systematic exploration. As this exploration proceeds, with and
without drugs, a certain limited degree of consensus is developing
about the importance and the (in some yet to be determined sense)
reality of the experiences that occur in such states, and more
and more study is aimed at placing this new consensual reality
in relation to religious and metaphysical traditions as well as
the very different consensual realities of common sense and science.
This was undoubtedly the most important cultural change that psychedelic
drugs produced. They released new forces into the consciousness
of millions of people. These forces might be seen as good, evil,
or morally ambiguous; they might be regarded as coming from within,
as an upsurge from the unconscious mind, or from beyond, as a
revelation from other planes of existence, or some way to reconcile
these interpretations might be sought. In any case, they raised
theoretical and practical issues that seemed to tax the combined
resources of modern science and the more ancient branches of human
wisdom. It was as though a country previously known to us only
through occasional travelers' tales in which it was hard to separate
reportage from imagination was now being visited not only by tourists
but by geographers and anthropologists who could compare their
observations, put them into a common language, and arrange them
in a theoretical order. A mass of new experience was provided
for the intellect to master or be mastered by. Furthermore, the
implications for the conduct of life sometimes seemed literally
tremendous (marvelous, terrible, capable of making one tremble).
Only a few people allowed their lives to be totally changed by
the psychedelic message (which was ambiguous anyway, like all
the verdicts of oracles), but no one who received it was completely
untouched. LSD is no longer held out as a way to transform the
world, but many people retain a powerful sense of incompletely
explored emotional and intellectual possibilities, of something
felt as intensely real and not yet explained or explained away.
To determine how much this is justified, we have to consider more
closely the actual effects of psychedelic drugs and the questions
they raise about the human mind and the universe.

Footnotes

1. As we were going to press, a book on CIA
mind control projects was published (Marks 1979). It relies on
interviews and on documents obtained from the government through
the Freedom of Information Act to expose CIA funding and encouragement
of behavioral science research, including LSD and other psychedelic
drug experiments, during the 1950s and early l9t;0s. To call inadequate
the standards of consent and protection for human research subjects
employed in some of this work would be an understatement; an example
is the practice of administering LSD to people who were not told
what drug they were taking or, in some cases, that they had taken
a drug at all. Marks also shows once again that in Cold War days
academics favored military and intelligence agencies with an attitude
of casual acceptance derived from an almost unthinking patriotism
that would be inconceivable today. However, it is impossible to
take seriously Marks' suggestion that the needs of the CIA were
a major source of academic interest in LSD and, by diffusion,
of the drug culture. These phenomena had their own intellectual
and social roots independent of and sometimes opposed to government
interests. (back)2. For autobiographical remarks from some
of the more articulate hippies on the role LSD played in their
lives, see Wolf 1968. (back)